John Oliver Laid Bare Trump's Refusal to Specifically Denounce Nazis

Hundreds of white supremacists, many brandishing weapons and armor, stormed an American city this weekend and attacked people in the street. One white supremacist allegedly used his car to murder a young woman marching in a group of counter-protesters who opposed his political views, injuring 19 others as he smashed through a crowd of human beings. This is what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia, this weekend. But you'd never have known it from the response we heard from the President of the United States. Donald Trump denounced the violence and the bigotry "on all sides" Saturday, the culmination of a pathetic moral catastrophe of a speech that, even for a president who continually debases his office, will go down as perhaps his worst sin against the American republic thus far.

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John Oliver finally drew some benefit from his Sunday night time slot last night as he was the first late-night host to weigh in on the darkness of Friday night's Tiki-Torch Putsch, and the somehow darker events that unfolded in the broad daylight of Saturday.

As ever, Oliver had some fun with the dweebs who showed up for this thing, all of whom, whether they were in a Klan hood or an ill-fitting white polo shirt tucked into pleated khakis, are walking evidence against the case there's any "master race." They're also pretty goddamned dumb, using tiki torches to light a rally for the greatness of white western culture "because," as Oliver put it, "nothing says 'white nationalism' like faux-Polynesian kitsch."

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But it was the president's response that drew most of Oliver's ire, and rightly so. The white supremacists have always existed in America, and white supremacy itself has poisoned our history and too many of our institutions in the present. But it took Donald Trump's presidency to make the worst that our society has to offer feel empowered again. That's why they felt confident showing up to Charlottesville without hoods or masks. White supremacist leaders in attendance, including former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke, mentioned Trump as an inspiration. And they felt more empowered after his remarks Saturday: The editor-in-chief of The Daily Stormer, the Internet's number one Nazi blog™, was ecstatic about Trump's response.

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"There honestly aren't that many instances in modern American politics where you can honestly think, that guy really should have mentioned the Nazis," Oliver said of Trump's speech, "but this is emphatically one of them." He added that Trump made "a wild false equivalence between Nazis and people who oppose Nazis," and this was exactly the problem. Both Siderism has long plagued coverage and discussion of American politics, where we're constantly subjected to manufactured banalities about how polarized everything is, and how we need to all find common ground. Well, one side—made up of the President of the United States and anyone who continues to support him—has now refused to declare themselves in opposition to Nazis. In fact, as Oliver put it, it was more than a non-disavowal: "a non-answer in a moment like this," he said, "is an answer."

Oliver continued, and drove the point home ruthlessly: "Because incredibly, in a country where previous presidents have actually had to defeat Nazis, we now have one who cannot even be bothered to fucking condemn them." As the former vice president put it this weekend, "there is only one side." The United States of America is on the side fighting the Nazis. The president should get on board, or he should not be the president.

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